How to copy hard-drive completely to external hard-drive?

I have 2 x 250GB hard-drives. One is sitting in my laptop running my Windows 7, the other is an external USB. The laptop HDD has a 14GB recovery partition I want to get rid of. So I want to copy all my files to external USB HDD, swap them, and then I can remove the partition.

Any idea how I can copy my entire hard-drive? Last time I tried, there was some files that refused to be copied because Windows said "access is denied". So I need a method that will get those files too.

What is the brand of the hard drive you want to copy it all to? I would recommend you use their cloning software.

They're both Seagates.

I found a software called Clonezilla. You put it on a USB/CD, boot from it, and it clones the hard-drive.

However, I have question now. I want it to clone only C:\ partition from my local disk, I want it to skip cloning the other partitions on the disk. I don't know how to set that up. Any suggestions? (Edit: I think I found it. In Clonezilla, it's called partition to partition clone.)

If you don't figure it out:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

That is seagates. That is what I would use.